Artists Space

Artists Space Dialogues:
Douglas Crimp and Bettina Funcke

Conversation
February 3, 2016, 7pm

One of the defining characteristics of Artists Space’s work is dialogue: dialogue between artists, writers, scholars, theorists and our audiences.

Artists Space Dialogues takes the simple format of a public conversation between two people. Every month renowned art historian Bettina Funcke will talk with an influential figure in the field of contemporary art and visual culture, investigating their work and thinking, their histories, trajectories, and processes.

People sitting on small wooden planks at the end of a pier. A large hole is visible in the side of the pier.
Alvin Baltrop, The Piers (exterior view of day's end), 1975-8. Courtesy The Alvin Baltrop Trust and Third Streaming, New York. [People sitting on small wooden planks at the end of a pier. A large hole is visible in the side of the pier.]

Curator and critic Douglas Crimp is professor of art history at the University of Rochester and was editor of October journal between 1977 and 1990. His writing and curatorial activities have had a sizable impact on art and culture over the past forty years, not least his groundbreaking essay and exhibition Pictures (Artists Space, 1977), which defined the postmodern relationship to image production.

Crimp’s close relationships and engagements with artists have led to key works of scholarship including On the Museum’s Ruins (with Louise Lawler), 1993; and “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol, 2012, both published by The MIT Press. He has also addressed the intersection of culture, politics and the urban environment of New York City in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics, 2002, and Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices 1970s to the Present (with Lynne Cooke) at the Reina Sofia in Madrid in 2010.

Before Pictures, Crimp’s memoir of New York in the 1970s, will be published next fall.

Taking its impetus from that memoir, how to pose old questions anew, as well as the role of dance in Crimp's life and writing will be some of the points of departure for the Artists Space Dialogue.